Quantum mutual information defined in terms of von Neumann entropy captures and quantifies all correlations,
quantum and classical, between the two parts of a bipartite quantum system. Within this framework entanglement
is the most distinguished type of quantum correlation, and a rich body of theory and experiment establishes
that entanglement is a potent and fungible resource for quantum information processing broadly. Bipartite systems
can exhibit quantum correlations beyond entanglement. Such non-classical states are called discordant in
general and strictly discordant (or dissonant) when the quantum state is separable. We show that strict discord
can increase the amount of information available from probing a quantum channel. We focus in this study on
the qubit depolarizing channel, using quantum Fisher information to measure the information available about
the channel depolarizing probability. We consider channel probes prepared, along with an ancilla, in a separable
two-qubit Bell-diagonal state. We prove for Bell-diagonal probes of the qubit depolarizing channel that, in the
absence of entanglement and controlling for marginal purity and degree of classical correlation, any increase in
strict discord between the probe and ancilla yields an accompanying increase in available statistical information
about the channel depolarizing probability.